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Thread: Internet 'a teenager' at 40

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    Default Internet 'a teenager' at 40

    Internet 'a teenager' at 40
    By Glenn Chapman
    AFP

    SAN FRANCISCO — Leonard Kleinrock never imagined Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube that day 40 years ago when his team gave birth to what is now taken for granted as the Internet.

    "We are constantly surprised by the applications that come along," Kleinrock told AFP as he and others at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) prepared to throw the Internet a 40th birthday party on Thursday.

    "It's a teenager now. It's learned some things but it has a long way to go. It's behaving erratically, but it's given enormous gratification to its parents and the community."

    On October 29, 1969 Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to "talk" to one at a research institute.

    Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones.

    "I thought it would be computer to computer, not people to people," Kleinrock said in a nod to online social networking and content sharing that are hallmarks of the Internet Age.

    "I never expected that my 99-year-old mother would be on the Internet like she was until she passed away."

    A key to getting computers to exchange data was breaking digitized information into packets fired between on-demand with no wasting of time, according to Kleinrock.

    He had outlined his vision in a 1962 graduate school dissertation published as a book.

    "Nobody cared, in particular AT&T," Kleinrock said. "I went to them and they said it wouldn't work and that even if it worked they didn't want anything to do with it."

    US telecom colossus AT&T ran lines connecting the computers for ARPANET, a project backed with money from a research arm of the US military.

    Engineers began typing "LOG" to log into the distant computer, which crashed after getting the "O."

    "So, the first message was 'Lo' as in 'Lo and behold'," Kleinrock recounted. "We couldn't have a better, more succinct first message."

    Kleinrock's team logged in on the second try, sending digital data packets between computers on the ARPANET. Computers at two other US universities were added to the network by the end of that year.

    "We had four-node network and tested the heck out of it," Kleinrock said. "We were able to break the network at will. It was very valuable to shake those things out early on."

    Funding came from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established in 1958 in response to the launch of a Sputnik space flight by what was then the Soviet Union.

    US leaders were in a technology race with Cold War rival Russia.

    Kleinrock's team ran a 15-foot cable between an Interface Message Processor device referred to by the acronym IMP and a "host" computer and tested sending data back and forth on September 2, 1969.

    "That was the day this baby was born," Kleinrock said.

    The National Science Foundation added a series of super computers to the network in the late 1980s, opening the online community to more scientists.

    "The Internet was there, but it was not known to Joe Blow on the street," Kleinrock said.

    The Internet caught the public's attention in the form of email systems in workplaces and ignited a "dot-com" industry boom that went bust at the turn of the century.

    "The original plan was that it should be very creative, basically it should be like a sandbox," British professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said of creating the World Wide Web in 1990.

    Kleinrock pegs the launch of "the dark side of the Internet" to the 1988 release of the first malicious software "worm."

    It was April of 1994 when the first spam email hit, according to the engineer.

    "We started sending email back to those folks saying 'Stop it'," Kleinrock said.

    "We sent so much email we crashed their computer. Inadvertently, the first spam email created the first denial-of-service response."

    Kleinrock, 75, sees the Internet spreading into everything.

    "The next step is to move it into the real world," Kleinrock said. "The Internet will be present everywhere. I will walk into a room and it will know I am there. It will talk back to me."

    He also foresees intelligent software "agents" that do people's bidding online.

    During an on-stage chat at a Web 2.0 Summit that ended Thursday in San Francisco, Berners-Lee said governments and big firms shouldn't meddle with the Web.

    "I'm always worried, of course, about anything large coming in to take control," Berners-Lee said.

    "Web technology itself should not tell you what's right and wrong; humanity has ways of doing that. It isn't the Wild West. The laws apply."

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    Default The Internet is turning 40 on Thursday

    The Bluffer's Guide
    October 26, 2009
    Compiled by jim withers
    The Montreal Gazette

    So, what's happening? The Internet is turning 40 on Thursday.


    Get out! It doesn't look a day over 15.
    That's because it hasn't always been called the Internet, and not many people were aware of its existence until it achieved critical mass and global reach in the 1990s. Also, there were a lot of other attention-grabbing events back in 1969, such as Woodstock, the John and Yoko bed-in at the Queen E, the Manson cult's murderous rampage, the BBC premiere of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Chappaquiddick, not to mention Neil and Buzz's bouncing up and down on the surface of the moon.

    But the birth of the Internet was also a giant leap, right?
    Yes siree, Bob.

    What exactly are we fêting on Thursday, the arrival of the World Wide Web?
    No. The Web actually marked its 20th anniversary in March. It was the creation of British computer software whiz Tim Berners-Lee and other scientists at the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) and it set the stage for the Internet explosion, which truly turned the world into a global village. (Unfortunately, Marshall McLuhan wasn't around to see it.) Berners-Lee and ex-colleagues, who worked on a system to allow scientists around the world to swap information on research, drew up the global hypertext language - think "http" on website addresses and links between pages - and hatched the first Web browser in 1990. The technology was made available for wider use on the Net shortly afterwards when CERN decided not to levy royalties.

    But that wasn't the birth of the Net?
    Not really, although some people argue that it was. A crucial stage occurred two decades earlier. Without getting all technical on you, the Internet was hatched on Oct. 29, 1969, about 10:30 p.m. local time, when researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) sent the first message using Internet technology to a computer at SRI International (then known as Stanford Research Institute) in Palo Alto, Calif.

    Who was involved?
    A key figure was computer-science prof Leonard Kleinrock, who will be on hand for the Net's 40th birthday party at UCLA on Thursday. Kleinrock, who outlined his Internet vision in a 1962 graduate dissertation that he turned into a book, led the team that got the UCLA computer to "talk" to one at SRI seven years later. This was during the Cold War, and the U.S. government supposedly wanted a communications system that could survive nuclear war. The project was known as ARPANet (or ARPANET) because it was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's response to the Soviet Union's Sputnik space program.

    ARPANet? Catchy name; can't imagine why they changed it to Internet.
    They weren't there yet. On Sept. 2, 1969, the UCLA team succeeded in breaking digitalized data into packets and moving them back and forth between its fridge-sized, battleship Honeywell Model 516 minicomputer to its Scientific Data Systems Sigma-7 through a five-metre-long cable. Then on Oct. 29, UCLA's Honeywell "spoke" across a 50-kilobit-per-second AT&T phone line with SRI's Honeywell. "That was the day this baby was born," 75-year-old Kleinrock says of the Net.

    Was the first communication between computers an iconic moment like the first telephone call?
    You mean when Alexander Graham Bell called his assistant in the adjoining room ("Mr. Watson! Come here! I want you!") in 1876? Unfortunately, no. The plan was for UCLA to send the message "LOGIN" to SRI, but the system crashed after "LO."

    Almost the first LOL. Did they call tech support in Bangalore?
    No, UCLA graduate student Charley Kline manage to make the connection on the second attempt.

    And then the Internet was off to the races?
    That would be an exaggeration, but two more universities were added to the network by the end of '69. The U.S. National Science Foundation added a series of supercomputers to the network in the late 1980s, opening the online community to more scientists. The Internet caught the public's attention through email in the workplace, and set off the dot-com boom (which went bust, but that's another story). Then Berners-Lee created the Web and, voilà! YouTube, Facebook and spam.

    Open-ended question:
    Is the Internet's 40th birthday cause for celebration or gnashing of teeth?

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